Feast day: April 16
St. Bernadette Soubirous
The asthmatic, impoverished 14-year-old to whom Our Lady appeared at Lourdes; she later became a nun and died at 35.
Marie-Bernarde 'Bernadette' Soubirous was born in 1844 at Lourdes, the eldest child of a miller whose family had fallen into deep poverty; she was small, often ill with asthma, poorly educated, and could barely read. It was to this least and lowliest of children that, in 1858, the Blessed Virgin chose to appear in eighteen visions at the grotto of Massabielle — a striking sign of God's love for the humble.
Bernadette never wavered in her simple, exact account of what she had seen, even under suspicious and sometimes harsh questioning by civil officials, police, and clergy who tried to trip her up or frighten her into changing her story. She gained nothing from it and wanted nothing; she only repeated what the lady had told her, including the mysterious name, 'the Immaculate Conception,' a phrase the unschooled girl did not understand.
Wishing to escape the fame that now surrounded her, she entered the convent of the Sisters of Charity at Nevers, far from Lourdes, and lived there as an ordinary nun, working in the infirmary and the sacristy. She asked no special treatment and spoke little of the apparitions, saying the Virgin had used her like a broom and then set her back in the corner. Her superiors sometimes treated her sternly, lest she grow proud.
Her health, never good, declined into years of painful illness, which she bore with patience, saying her 'job' now was simply to be sick. She died at Nevers in 1879, only thirty-five years old. She was canonized in 1933 — not for having seen the visions, but for the genuine holiness, humility, and patience of her hidden life. Her body, found incorrupt, is venerated at Nevers.
Interrogators tried for years to break her story. Her answer never changed: 'I am charged to tell you, not to make you believe.'
“I am charged to tell you, not to make you believe.”
— St. Bernadette Soubirous
Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/09389b.htm
Get a story like this every Sunday.